Accidents Happen and Other Stories by F.H. Batacan

Author:F.H. Batacan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

KEEPING TIME

The door of his hotel room is open; the porter has stowed his bags and is now hanging up the contents of his suit bag in the closet. Mike enters the room sideways, sucking in his gut. It is an old habit; even though he has shed more than a hundred and forty pounds, he still feels like a fat man. Sometimes he catches himself doing it; when he does, he backs out of the door and comes in again like a normal person.

The porter closes the closet door, stands aside with a deferential smile. Just like him, falling into old habits. Mike takes a large bill from his wallet. The porter is briefly stunned, then flashes him a broad smile. “Thank you, sir.”

Mike nods, says nothing. The door closes behind him and he is alone.

He is bone-tired—six countries in seventeen days—but there’s still work to be done. He unlaces his shoes, sets them aside in one corner of the closet and pads around the carpeted room in his socks. He finds his laptop bag, plugs the machine into an outlet, begins undressing as it boots up.

Having lost all that weight, Mike tends to take better care of his clothes—mainly because he now has better clothes to take care of. Although his job has always paid well, he never bothered much about his clothing or appearance until the weight started coming off a little over three years ago. These days he always dresses well; even after long-haul flights, he arrives at meetings immaculately turned out, as though making up for decades of self-loathing and neglect. On site—where weather, ground, and even social conditions can be unpleasant at best and downright treacherous at worst—he takes great pains to dress appropriately, to remain as clean as humanly possible.

He hangs up his jacket, shirt, and trousers carefully; he’ll have them dry-cleaned tomorrow morning. He strips off his socks, roots around in the closet for a laundry bag and puts the socks inside. He’ll take a shower and brush his teeth before buckling down to business.

In his bare feet, the transition from carpet to the chilly marble tile of the bathroom is a bit jarring. He doesn’t particularly care for the paper slippers that hotels provide— there is something silly and ineffectual about them. So he takes the cold floor like a man, without complaint or fuss.

In the mirror above the capacious sink, he sees a stranger. For the better part of nearly five decades, the man in the mirror was always overweight, ballooning to some three hundred and forty pounds around seven or eight years ago. He was tall—well over six feet—and he had a nice enough face. But the face grew jowly and shiny from sweat, and he couldn’t bend far enough to cut his own toenails. At some point, he tipped from pre- to full-blown Type 2 diabetes. He learned to exit conversations quickly when the discussion turned to his weight or change the subject when even the

most well-meaning of relatives told him “You’d be so handsome if only .

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